Francis Hayman RA (1708 – 2 February 1776) was an English painter and illustrator who became one of the founding members of the Royal Academy in 1768, and progressive its first librarian.
Born in Exeter, Devon, Hayman begun his artistic career as a scene painter in London’s Drury Lane theatre (where he after that appeared in youthful roles) before establishing a studio in St Martin’s Lane.
A versatile artiste influenced by the French Rococo style, he achieved some note during the 1740s through decorative paintings executed for the supper boxes at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in London. Hayman was afterward a affluent portraitist and chronicles painter.
Combining some of these, he contributed 31 pictures to a 1744 edition of Shakespeare’s plays by Sir Thomas Hanmer, and sophisticated portrayed many leading contemporary actors in Shakespearean roles, including David Garrick as Richard III (1760). He plus illustrated Pamela, a novel by Samuel Richardson, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Tobias Smollett’s translation of Don Quixote, and other Famous works. In the 1760s Hayman was commissioned by Jonathan Tyers, proprietor of Vauxhall Gardens and the Denbies estate, to paint a series of large-scale chronicles paintings depicting British victories in the Seven Years’ War.
He was an able teacher. His pupils included Mason Chamberlin, Nathaniel Dance-Holland, Thomas Seton and Lemuel Francis Abbott, and he was after that a strong influence on Thomas Gainsborough.
With Joshua Reynolds, Hayman was actively vigorous in the formation of the Society of Artists, a forerunner of the Royal Academy, during the beforehand 1760s.
Hayman died in 1776 and was buried in an unmarked grave in St Anne’s Church, Soho.
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